Jorus Merrill
is mek bote
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: I found a picture and I need to make it a city. It dovetails well with a canon world in ORC space.
- Image Credit: 'Fraktaal,' by Julius Horsthuis, found at...
- Canon: It's a fleshed-out version of one of the many huge nameless cities on Karideph.
- Links: As below.
- City Name: Toronis
- Classification: Metropolis
- Location: Karideph
- Affiliation: Toronis is affiliated with the Kari government, a member of the Outer Rim Coalition.
- Demographics: Toronis is home to more than a billion Kari (a tiny fraction of the planet's population), and perhaps ten million offworlders of various origins, primarily the Outer Rim.
- Wealth: High. The Kari are intensely industrious and command an unrivaled labour force.
- Stability: High. The Kari culture and biology predispose them to collaboration and collective goals. The offworlders are not numerous enough to seriously affect stability.
- Description: Toronis is one of the great cities that dot Karideph's planet-wide agricultural fields. Like all Kari cities, it connects to an immense underground residential and transportation network.
KALLEA MEMORIAL SPACEPORT
This port commemorates a legendary hyperspace explorer who made significant contributions to the region. Karideph is the endpoint of the Rimma Trade Route, a super-hyperlane; it connects the Rimma to the Minos Cluster, Wild Space, the Triton Trade Route, and the Outer Rim Coalition. Kallea Memorial is gargantuan. It sees dozens of superfreighters and hundreds of smaller transports daily.
Not surprisingly, Kallea Memorial is also a hub for offworlders. Entertainment and lodgings to their taste radiate out from the west end of the spaceport. If you spend time on Karideph, chances are you've booked or rented a room near Kallea or one of its counterparts in other cities. Toronis is a dense arcology, better-planned than, say, Coruscant. Kari are smaller than humanoids and have a higher tolerance for population density. As a result, offworlder lodgings are somewhat cramped but generally well-maintained and well-lit, comparable to a cleaner Nar Shaddaa.
Kallea Memorial has its own dedicated defenses, including a theatre shield generator whose edges cover the offworlder district to the west. Wings of local K-90 starfighters protect Kallea Memorial alongside larger vessels.
COALITION BASE
The Outer Rim Coalition's defense forces use a secured northern portion of Kallea Memorial to refuel and repair their vessels. Common sights include Avatar-class expeditionary cruisers, Qektoth corvettes, Pimbrellan League frigates, Underground RebelX gunships, and even Uukaablian Tahree command cruisers. The base relies on Kallea Memorial's theatre shield for protection from starship bombardment, but has a lower-grade shield of its own in case of emergency. The Judges - the Coalition's wandering law enforcement, many of them Force-sensitive - might drop by to rest and re-arm, or they might go to the offworlder district, which lies to the southwest of the base.
TORONIS UNIVERSITY
The Kari have often been judged less intelligent than humanoids. However, much of that mistaken perception stemmed from the ancient Empire and is bound up in their fecundity, small stature, dense communities, insectoid nature, and thickly accented Basic - along with decades of forced technological impediment and isolation. The Kari are fully sapient, builders of massive cities and coordinators of planet-wide agricultural projects. Toronis University is the city's largest institute of higher education, with an enrollment of twenty million. Its agriculture program draws scholars from Ukio and the Core's Ag Circuit. Industry leaders like Salliche Ag have cozy relationships with administration. Toronis University is also notable for its arcology planning, closed-ecosystem engineering, and architectural fields of study.
PRIME GATE
Most of the planet's 88-100 billion inhabitants live beneath the surface and rarely, if ever, see the sky. Toronis connects to the planet's gargantuan underground at many points. The Prime Gate is one of those points, notable mainly for its symbolic importance. Many Kari see the pilgrimage to view the sky as a sort of rebirth. The Prime Gate (a horizontal aperture ringed by steps) sees hundreds of thousands of Kari pilgrims pass through every day. The Gate lies below the cityscape, on the east side. It marks the boundary between the underground and the city proper. Above the gate, pilgrims still need to climb for a quarter mile or thereabouts before they see stars or the sun. However, long light-pipe lenses convey natural daylight down to the Prime Gate. The experience is apparently transformative if you're a Kari who's lived underground all your life.
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Centuries before the Gulag Plague, the Empire discovered Karideph. They feared the Kari work ethic and reproductive rate, and kept spaceflight technology out of their hands. Such attitudes persisted through various regimes. It was the Gulag Plague that set the Kari free as refugee spacecraft landed on Karideph, running out of fuel at the end of the Rimma Trade Route. The Gulag killed over sixty percent of Karideph due to the close confines of cities both above and below ground. In the following centuries, however, the Kari replaced their lost population with ease; their powerful oral tradition kept their way of life stable; and they adopted the technologies that the desperate had brought them by accident. Toronis and Kallea Memorial served as early adopters and incubators of these new technologies.
By the modern era, the Kari were a fully hypercapable civilization. Karideph, through surface cities like Toronis, became a regional hub of interstellar commerce, and a power player in the Outer Rim Coalition. Not surprising, considering that Karideph probably has more inhabitants than the rest of the Coalition put together.
